The Dictionary of Animal Languages

by Heidi Sopinka

  I first met some of the artists in the group at Brasserie Lipp with Tacita, where we wrote single words that formed odd conjunctions on folded paper and passed them to the next person. One of the artists poured whisky from a flask into my champagne glass. Cheaper, he said. Something gets read aloud that sounds like, The guillotine is a lovely bitch, lazy and carnal with winding blond hair, it sleeps with its heavily ordained tongue. Tacita and I collapse from drink and laughter. And I feel not that I am becoming one of the artists of the group, but that I am one already. I have such an odd feeling that it takes me a moment to notice what it is. For the first time I can remember, it is as though I belong. I am relieved of the kneejerk reaction to rebel. Though oddly what they rebel against, the bourgeoisie—my entitled background, with its opulent house and tutors and nannies—is the very thing that allows me to have the confidence to participate. For the first time, the action of the mind is the only thing that counts.

  When I finally arrive, Tacita grabs my hand and leads me in. I see many of the artists I know. There is a thick warmth of bodies, and music, perfume, and cigarette smoke. My eyes move toward the doorframe, where Istvan is speaking to someone I haven’t seen before. A man. Beautiful and filthy, like a fallen angel. I feel a flint of heat. Our eyes meet for a moment, nothing happens, but something passes through. I am handed a glass of very cold champagne, and eventually placed at the table between an anarchist and a revolutionary, their faces lit by candles. Across from me is Leni, an artist on a government grant to study rainbows. Initially there is an outlay of the sort of proper, rational food that human beings eat. A pot of soupe aux cèpes, haricots verts with marrons chaudes au beurre. Galettes rolled and stuffed with kirsch cream. Cockles in their shiny, gleaming little shells. Then Tacita winks at me as a hare stuffed with oysters is brought to the table. My plate is whisked away. Tacita by way of explanation declares, Ivory does not eat meat. She believes it is wrong to deprive animals of their life. Particularly when they are so difficult to chew. We then dine on what I believe to be tapioca Tacita has dyed black by cooking it in squid ink, which she serves on cracked ice with lemon as though we are eating dinner plates of caviar, like makeshift Tsars and Tsarinas. Scandal threatens to erupt at any moment.

  There is Satie playing, and a theatrically articulated dessert table comprising a pyramid of green figs that have been baked by the sun, crystallized apricots, translucent preserves, and macaroons in the improbable colours Istvan has described of Moscow architecture, mint, salmon, lemon yellow. And there are crates of Madiran wine that Istvan’s friend Hugo has brought up from the dusty, cowboy corner of France that smells like desert. The kind of coarse unfashionable wine that Tacita likes because it strikes you alive.

  —

  Ivory, says Tacita, introducing me to the man who was speaking to Istvan. This is Lev.

  In my pocket, his drawing crackles.

  He is dark, vivid, tall. Eyes so blue they are almost white. He runs his fingers through his black hair like rays, tangled and rough and cut short. This surprises me. I had always thought of Russians having eyes and hair and skin all of the same pale shade. His black wool suit is tight and his buttoned jacket abbreviated in the sleeves, as though it might be the suit of another man. He has a ripped piece of fabric knotted around his neck. I’ve never seen a man who looks like he does. He might be twice my age, though in truth, I cannot tell.

  Ivory is a painter at the academy with me, Tacita tells Lev.

  And?

  And what?

  What do you paint? Ivory. He says my name slowly, with difficulty, in French. It is not his first, or even second language.

  What is in my mind.

  What is in your mind?

  The way he says this could also mean, What are you thinking about?

  The forest.

  Why forest? he says.

  I am reminded that forest is the feminine gender in French. I like how he pronounces it, la forêt, as though a leaf just fluttered down. He doesn’t know what his voice is like.

  I think it is a place in which everything desired and feared lives. I spent my childhood escaping to the woods that surrounded my house. I always felt safe there.

  He laughs.

  —

  Later Tacita tells me about when Lev was a child in Ukraine. His father came from Siberia, his mother from the small Ukrainian village where they met. He saw her, from a distance, washing her family’s laundry. A line of white squares cutting across the blue sky. He saw her only twice, never up close. And then asked for her hand in marriage. Her father offered him a small dowry. Two thinning cows. Not much money. Lev’s father refused to bargain for more because he loved her.

  Lev attended school for exactly two years. On one occasion, his teacher told him the class was getting some books and everyone was to bring thirty kreuzens. Lev’s father gave him the money, but because the books had not yet arrived, he held on to it. On the way home from school it was very cold, and he and his friends stopped at the neighbour’s, Mrs. Ruza’s, house to get warm. She had baked some buns, which they all ate hastily, so Lev gave her his thirty kreuzens. When Lev’s father found out that the money had been spent on buns, he was furious. He said, You have made your choice. You have eaten your books.

  He was eight years old, Tacita continues, when his father took him out of school. He was conscripted to tend oxen in the forest with the other village boys. The forest was infested with wolves. There were eight boys, or holavari, head shepherds. At night he said they slept in the forest under the trees. They would light a big fire that they kept going all night to keep warm and to frighten away the wolves. One boy would return to the village to bring back supper for the group each night. This continued to be his regular routine for five years. Darkness, fire, yellow-eyed wolves. Istvan says this is what populated Lev’s dreams for years.

  Tacita, do you know about those tsunami mushrooms that grow in Japanese caves? The ones that predict seismic activity?

  I understand, Tacita nods, taking my hand and pulling us down to sit on the cold street curb, marking the gravity of this. Un choc amoureux, she says. The body is sacred, I. It rarely lies.

  Holavari, I repeat to Tacita. It sounds like a knuckle brushing across an earbone. I wonder if he is resentful. If he hates animals because of this.

  No, I, Tacita says. He thinks they are beautiful.

  How can he say that?

  He thinks they are beautiful because unlike us, they are naked on the inside too.

  —

  It is no surprise then, Lev’s reply.

  Forests exist for their own reasons, he says to me, not ours. Beware of security, he warns. It is a false belief. It does not exist in nature.

  There is more wine. The conversation reaches the vaulted ceilings of Istvan and Tacita’s apartment. The anarchist says we must explode social order to transform life itself. The revolutionary wipes the corners of his mouth and smiles. His teeth are purple. Revolutionary-speak turns into theatre. We go around the table. Tacita blindly takes a book off the shelf. She disappears into the kitchen for three-quarters of an hour and re-emerges with Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations baked in honey, encrusted with poppy seeds and small blue cornflowers suspended in circles of chèvre dipped in flowering rosemary. I procure an omelette with hair, cut from the beard of a dinner guest who had taken too much eau de vie and snores on the couch. When he wakes, we serve it to him on a white china plate. Ursula, a patroness in a gentleman’s dinner jacket who speaks in perfectly pitched images, finds a typewriter, places it on the table, and types what she says later is the sixth Brandenburg Concerto. The harpsichord solo, we are shown, is in red. Lev then orders us to be silent. We are. Everything stops for a moment. The clattering of forks and knives and crystal glasses, chairs creaking, coughing, the striking of matches, even the paper leaves outside. It is almost funny for a moment, but then it begins to feel profound. His eyes are mirthful but in a deadly serious, funereal tone he says, Listen.

  Listen to the sou
nd of night falling.

  Tacita tells me what I missed when I left. That the dainty pranks were upstaged by a giant, depressive but prolific artist named Félix, who, full of wine and out of ideas, unzipped his trousers and took out his immense occupant, laying it on his dinner plate.

  Everyone laughed. The ladies did not faint, she says. They merely wondered at its pink, heavy idleness.

  I am filled with unexpected joy and too much wine, and everything is starting to feel like a torpid, slow-motion game, like the pastis-dazed old men who play boules under the plane trees with knotted roots in the breadwarm sun of Provence. The decibels melting as I weave through the tangles of guests to get my coat. Lev and I knock arms in the front hall, when I’m reaching for my gloves. I kiss Tacita and Istvan, four times, and Lev offers to walk me back to Mme. Tissaud’s. I don’t remember my feet on the cobbled stones, or the edges of curbs.

  He tells me, his voice in sharp pieces lost in an automobile engine that skids by, that he is leaving early in the morning. Obligations.

  What?

  It is something he cannot discuss.

  We walk beside each other. My chest is burning. The city is lidded and a shiny-wet silver, rain-washed pavements that smell of petrol and chestnuts. I feel protected, emboldened, by the wine.

  I remain distanced, polite. He tells me of his work, but I find it impossible to reconcile this tractable low voice with the violence of ideas that comes from him. He talks about his paintings. His cheekbones sharp, like a flicker of fire, possibly from hunger, and I am caught off guard. I say something about the beauty of the city. How it asks you to fall in love with it. He says the light is an invitation to devotion. But he says he is bored by beauty alone. He takes nothing from the outside. It’s all coming from inside, he says. I am just the amusement of the forces that are born and die in me. He has an exuberance undercut with a kind of detachment. Something in his physicality, in his line of questioning that induces panic. The panic makes me suddenly feel so alive I could jump out of my own skin. It’s as though he asks me to follow him, and then leaves me there to find my own way out. I love his words, the durability of them. My mind concocting desires around them. He says he likes the way I held Tacita’s scissors. With grace and violence. He takes in my quietness. I see how stillness holds him.

  I concentrate on the stones underfoot, and then the black wool trousers, the tight-fitting suit. I notice the outline of his body. His fingers as he buttons his jacket and turns up its collar. His gaze is startling when he turns toward me, his eyes like electricity. He asks things of me, not allowing me the shelter of my own mind. He inquires about my art, what interests me. I don’t have the language to explain myself. No one has ever really asked me anything. I have always hidden. Listened to others. And why is this what I prefer? The silence began as something I practised, meant to be protective, but now it is something impossible to stop. It distresses me to think there are things, regular things I might be incapable of.

  What about you? he asks. In the following silence, I hear the tink of the streetlamp filaments turn on, like delicate splinters of glass.

  I am attracted to people who need help, I think. Not sure if I’ve actually said it aloud.

  He turns to me. His face the map of a lost country, like the ones Tacita finds hidden and beautiful in an invisible city that overlays the one we are in.

  Maybe it is you, he says, who needs help.

  DEER

  Small, pale messages etched in grass.

  HE LEAVES ME WITH A fistful of white roses brushed with the faintest green, picked from someone’s front garden. He hands them to me and then walks away, everything disappearing with him. For the next few days I watch them unwhorl with slow deliberation. I had always thought that flowers between a man and a woman were banal, but these aren’t that.

  An unopened heart does not bleed, Mme. Tissaud says, avoiding my eyes, when she snips the stems and fishes out a vase the next morning.

  A few days pass. I cannot sleep, I eat nothing. Food is pushed around my plate. I am half-starved and liminal. Though I have no appetite, I despise my response. Hunger is not original.

  I wash my brushes in Mme. Tissaud’s back sink. The chaud and froid are labelled in reverse, but it makes no difference because no flat in Paris that I know of has hot water. I have an assignment to draw the same fruitbowl on five separate days. Painting food when you are not eating is useful. You see it as more of an object, more theoretically, which allows for the kind of distance required to adequately render the so-called truth. It’s different when a painting comes to me. When I roll out of bed, blink my eyes, and go straight to the canvas, without washing or eating or exchanging pleasantries with Mme. Tissaud. I duck from the world, its diversions, so that I can get it down before I lose it. I squeeze out the tubes and mix the colours I will have seen in my head, and dip in my brush and begin on the canvas and stand back and feel full of electricity. Nothing can touch it.

  I am trying to remain open to the tedious assignments that I am told will make me a better painter. I like how they want you to understand the chemistry of everything you use, even pencil and paper. But this assignment and the essay I just turned in on the sculptural qualities of Cézanne’s fruit begin to make me unsure.

  What’s next? I groan to Tacita. Am I going to become one of those fossilized critics, describing the colours of a Van Gogh moon?

  That’s impossible, Tacita says, buttoning up her coat. The moon is not a colour.

  Le loup, as Istvan calls him. Which could be a reference to his name, or his time in the woods, but I imagine it is directed more at something in his wicked, indifferent eyes. The remoteness. His separateness from his own power. Though from Istvan, this comes off as a term of endearment rather than derision.

  La rentrée is dying, I think. The leaves are golden and starting to fall, foretelling the brittle cold, the one I will soon know. It is different here than in the north. The savage cold. There it is simple. It is a matter of surviving. There are provisions. Here it is complicated. It is damp, and there are cracks in the tall, thick, clouded windows. The clothing too fashionable and thin. Nothing is designed for creating or keeping heat. I can see my breath in my flat when I wake up now, but the cold is good for painting. You keep your focus.

  I have been working on an animal painting, red tones in the landscape as though lit by fire, an odd white moon, birds, and a deer. A strange mist. Thick bright paint, an off-kilter feeling. When you look closer you can see that one of the creatures is a woman with an animal’s face. She is like a ghost, familiar somehow, but unusual-looking. She has rain-soaked skin, like a person barely saved from drowning. But her expression is one of revolt, as though she would tear someone’s hair out if they came too close. It has been slow, trying to find the right white. I’ve mixed red, blue, and yellow together, which becomes a dark grey. In the painting, it comes across as white. This is something I learned at the academy. We have studied Millet, Daubigny, and Corot, who are able to paint snow without using any white at all. I’ve fallen in love with red, not too blue, not orange, but the beautiful perfect reds you see in a child’s cap in Renaissance portraits.

  Tacita and I walk to a bistro where she insists we must consume frites, and wine. We pass a faded poster for the bullfights in Spain. You know the word matador in Spanish means killer, she says. Our shoes make little clicks on the cobblestones as we walk, the sound I have read whales make when meeting other whales, though usually they are silent.

  The warmth of the bistro is the difference between walking from shadow to sun. Its dim chandeliers lit like a low flame against the mirrored walls. There are potted palms, banquettes of wine-coloured velvet, and women throwing their heads back in laughter. Round tables with rattan chairs on black and white tile, tasselled lamps, and ceilings a whole extra metre above normal, cigarette smoke swirling in the beams of light. All of Paris lives in cafés, I realize, in part because their apartments are too cold.

  In the bistro I say, Ta
cita, you must tell me something.

  Anything, dove. What is it?

  What do you know of Lev?

  She exhales smoke and runs her fingers through her short dark hair, the cigarette an inch from her scalp.

  There is a long pause.

  Shit, she finally says.

  What?

  He has a wife.

  My cheeks burn red. It is as though she has struck me in the face.

  In this time, Tacita, who has the frame of a sparrow, eats both our plates of frites. She washes down some wine. All right, she says, banging down her glass, feigning dead seriousness. There are two ways to become enlightened. One is androgyny.

  This makes me laugh. As in a fairy tale, how every character is just an aspect of ourselves, male and female?

  Sort of. Smoke spirals out of her cigarette.

  Androgyny suggests completeness, the beatific condition of desirelessness. She holds the cigarette to her mouth. The coming together of male and female forces in a single individual. For most of us, she says, her head tilted, smiling, this is not possible. The other is the attainment of this ideal through the meeting of a man and woman in love. It is an ontological leap, one of great daring.

  And marriage?

  It is everything. She exhales. And nothing too. Though nothing isn’t necessarily the opposite of everything. She pauses. Pronounced man and wife. I think it is ridiculous how in marriage a man gets pronounced as a man. It is always the woman who must change identities. She taps the ash. Marriage can be the highest plane, or merely a binding contract. And really, how can anyone vow they will love longer than the love might last? She shifts in her chair. I mean, I was a child, really, when I married. That day, I washed my hair in the morning. As I sat drinking coffee, an iridescent blue butterfly that looked like it came from another hemisphere alighted on my robe and stayed there. I sat, and then walked around the room, dazzled by its presence in a time when I was not sure what I deserved.